


Played like a harmonica by a mouth without teeth

by maplewoodmoth



Category: Naruto
Genre: Angst and Hurt/Comfort, Anyway I was on the nart wiki and got emotions about the people left behind, Fluff and Angst, Fluff and Hurt/Comfort, Gen, I don't even GO here but the muse bug bit my fingers, The fluff comes in bits and pieces, and done dirty by the system, but there will be a lot later! Also blood, so enjoy, so much blood
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2020-07-09
Updated: 2021-01-10
Packaged: 2021-03-05 03:06:58
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 2
Words: 4,487
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/25167424
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/maplewoodmoth/pseuds/maplewoodmoth
Summary: Anko goes after Orochimaru. She kicks ass in the process and heals. Not in that particular order and in completely unconnected events, she learns what it means to be human again. Or at least what that means for her.
Relationships: Mitarashi Anko & Orochimaru
Kudos: 4





	1. Chapter 1

Anko thinks sometimes that she’d be better off if Orochimaru had killed her, if the damned cursed seal he left her with had led to her death. _Better,_ she thinks, _to have died a hero, a victim, someone blameless, than survive your trauma only to be villainized for it._ She thinks that the village would have preferred her as that. 

Orochimaru wouldn’t. He sees her as a success, a triumph, something to be learned from. It makes her hate herself even more.   
Maybe that’s why she refuses to succumb to the lure of the seal though; or the lure of ending it all. Because she wants to become something he regrets, as much as the village does. 

Maybe she’s not a monster, not in the way HE is, hopefully never in the way HE is. But it’s only a matter of time. So she might as well take him out while she still can.

**

Anko doesn’t cry anymore. She’s too old and mature and hardened to cope with betrayal in a manner as something so paltry and useless as tears. 

So she not-cries instead: deals with nightmares and what-ifs, and goes over old memories to see if there was any sign she missed- anything at all, that she could have seen coming. 

If a person you love is a monster, has done monstrous things to you and others, how do you compare who they are with who you thought they were? 

By hating yourself, of course.

**

There’s. Not a lot she can do, in the immediate aftermath. She avoids mirrors, to keep from seeing the black inked mark set into her skin. As if it was something deliberate done, with her incentive. Which it’s _not._

She covers it up, wears high necked collars, but the burning feeling of other people’s eyes always go to her neck. After a while she starts hating them [the people, the collars, the chafing of the fabric against her burning skin: the eyes, the eyes, the eyes, the eyes] too. If they’re going to want to see her burden, then they’re going to have to work for it though. She’ll never give them the pleasure of seeing her without her armour. 

As a kunoichi, she knows better than to let her enemies see her weakest spots _(when did she start thinking of her fellow comrades as the enemies,_ she wonders, _when did she begin to feel as if they are something to be defended from?)._

**

Anko’s 10, graduated early from the Academy, and is about to meet her team, her sensei. She’s so excited that she thinks she could fly: jump from the rooftops and keep running until the tiles run out and then just keep on running. She does her best to hide it though: ninjas must never show their emotion, must never let anyone know what they’re thinking, lest it be used as a weakness. _Among comrades though,_ Anko thinks, _it might be safe enough, but you never know about missions and who else might be watching._ Look underneath the underneath and all that. Best wait and see if her new sensei bothers to do any of that. But kami and goddesses above and below, she’s so _excited._

She’s practically squirming in her seat, trying to keep herself still, flipping a kunai between and around her fingers as easily as anything, just to keep herself busy, keep herself from shouting with joy and glee. Anko knows stillness, knows quiet and peace in the way that the things of the undergrowth do. So as the classroom slowly trickles down, team by team leaving, she ceases her wiggles, stops her leg from bouncing, and when the door opens seamlessly and soundlessly again, she has sheathed her kunai and is almost motionless with anticipation. 

“I’m here for Mitarashi Anko” the summons says, from the floor. “I’ll take you to your new sensei”, the snake says. Dear Kami, she's so happy she could die. “Come along now.” And she’s up in a flash, doing her best not to stumble over her own feet and make a bad impression on the summons and indirectly, on her new sensei. 

When Anko reaches the door, she pauses, looking down at the small summons, beautiful with their smooth, pearlescent scales curled neatly into a pile as the summons looks back up at her. She can’t imagine that it’s comfortable for its neck to be craned so far back as to look at her, so in one motion Anko drops to her knee, keeping her distance and says, “Do you want a ride snake-san? You’ll have a better view to direct me from higher up on my shoulders, if you want?” 

The snake looks at her, assessing her slowly with one beady eye, and then the other. “I could kill you much more easily from this angle.” They say, and Anko blanches but swallows, and says, “Then I will disappoint my sensei before I meet them, I guess.” Soldiering on, she adds “and anyway, a shinobi shouldn’t attack a fellow shinobi.” 

“Spoken and well met” the snake says, and then flicks it’s tongue out to taste her scent. “You may address me as Sumire-san.” and with that, the newly named snake slithers up Anko’s outstretched hand and settles comfortably onto her shoulders, a heavy weight, a heavy reminder, but loosely coiled. 

Anko finds herself beaming, as she smoothly rises up, and leaves the classroom and her former classmates behind, eyes at her back. She doesn’t look behind her because she knows there’s nothing to miss, going forwards. 

On her shoulders, Sumire-san hisses into her ear, something like laughter, something like a warning. “Oh I think you will do well.” She says, and Anko outright laughs with joy as she exits the academy and walks towards her new life.

**

Anko’s at Training Field 3, which is where Sumire-san directed her to wait for her new sensei. 

There is already a shinobi at Training Field 3, lithe and long and still, all long dark hair and a thin mouth, twisted in concentration, yet so utterly relaxed. Anko can feel herself twitch, hand spasm in a half anticipatory motion that she pauses on impulse. The deep, golden eyes of the shinobi flick to her direction, pin her in her spot. She is so jealous of whoever shinobi is, they are so cool. 

“Mitarashi Anko”. OH SHIT, THAT’S HER. “I am Orochimaru. You may call me Sensei. You have already met Sumire, one of my summons, and will meet the others as time goes on.” Here the shinobi, Orochimaru, her new _sensei_ narrows their eyes at Anko, “If you do not disappoint me, that is.” 

Anko may be bold, may be brash, but she is not _stupid._ Inclining her head as much as she can without unseating Sumire-san on her shoulders, she bows as low as she can at Orochimaru. 

“I will not disappoint you Sensei.” She vows, and here- here she sees Orochimaru grin, slow and wide and warm. 

“Then we shall get along fine little Anko.” Orochimaru says, and Anko grins right back as wide as she can. With Orochimaru smiling at her, and Sumire-san hissing low and happy in her ear, Anko is as excited as she can be, and none the wiser for the heartbreak the future holds.

**

Anko is 12, and officially made chunin, and waking up with the worst hangover of her _life._ She muffles a groan into her pillowcase and does her best to end her miserable existence. Unfortunately she can’t move, the heavy weight of another body keeping her from fully turning over the way that she wants to. 

She wiggles a little bit, before giving up after she realises that resistance is futile, and whoever or whatever is in her bed with her has a grip like an octopus. Or a snake. Multiple snakes, Anko realises, as she cranes her head over, hissing at the way the light from plays through the shades to hit directly into her weary eyes and straight into her throbbing skull. 

She’s amid a puppy pile of her summons, she realises, and they’re all in the sunlight soaked patch on her bed, curled around each other and her. 

There’s Jiji-nee, Udon, Soba, and Hanami. Ayame, Kurumi, Tsukimi, and Bocchan. Yogomi and Goma and Itokiri. Her bed is a mess of venomous and harmless snakes alike, and Anko knows that if she tried to move, then she’d probably end up bitten and tangled by surprised snakes, and have to deal with their panic and apologies while she searches for each of the individual remedies for their venoms. It’s probably for the best that she doesn’t move, then. Also her head hurts, and after a night of celebrating her passing her exams, she doesn’t think that she could move now even if she wanted to. Which, now that she thinks about it, she doesn’t. She’s quite comfortable with their heavy weight around her, the smooth hiss of scales sliding against each other as her bedfellows move lulling her back to sleep.

She turns her head back towards the door, trying to get comfortable without ending up with a crick in her neck, and ends up eye to eye with Sumire-san- ‘just Sumire now since you’ve passed the exams little Mitarashi’. 

Anko suppresses the twitch that she can feel going up her spine, because she’s a chunin now and better than that, better than letting surprise at being snuck up on by a summons overwhelm her. 

“Sumire-s- Sumire.” She fumbles, “Please tell me Sensei isn’t here.” Anko asks desperately, because if he saw what a mess she is, how _undignified_ she is right now, she would absolutely _die._

“Of course he is.” Sumire says, causing her sense of worth to crash down around her. “He wanted to make sure you didn’t die after going on that bender last night and challenging everyone who so much as looked at you to a fight, because, and I quote, you are a ‘kami-designed CHUNIN, sent from the gods to sweep their asses into the fire for being belligerent assholes’.” The snake seemed to hiss in laughter, but it could also be the rest of her summons waking up to hear the tales of her exploits last night. 

“He was very impressed how you claimed you would fight for his honor, though he says that he can probably take care of himself against most of those two-bit shinobi who don’t have an ounce of cleverness between them and a rock.” Sumire adds, as if Anko’s world isn’t being pulled down around her. She tries to burrow under the pillow but Sumire’s eyes don’t blink, and the depth of her mirth at her mortification follows her into her nightmares and into the dark. 

“Ah.” She mumbles out, and when she dares peek up, it’s to her mentor, her sensei, Orochimaru, peering around the door of her room with a mug of something steaming in his hand to peer mirthfully at her. His expression is flat, but Anko knows he’s amused otherwise Sumire wouldn’t have been the one to tell her about her trials and triumphs the night before. 

Sumire, seeing her job fulfilled that Anko isn’t going to die in her snake-pile unsupervised, dismisses herself in a puff of smoke. 

Anko can feel her face heating up, apologies bubbling up at her indiscretion and behavior the night before. Orochimaru silences her with a look, however, before she can say anything. Mildly he says, “I presume you are comfortable and fully intact after your escapades last night?” 

“...Yes.” Anko mutters, studiously avoiding his eyes and trying to burrow farther into her comforter. 

“Good.” He says dismissively, and as if he isn’t literally watching her plight of being covered by snakes, places the mug down with a thump next to her head, and turns around and leaves. His long dark hair swishes smoothly behind him and Anko is filled with a wave of envy for how effortless Orochimaru makes everything seem so effortless. She’s also filled with a wave of nausea from her hangover, but the envy and admiration for her sensei comes out on top. 

Anko watches him leave, before cautiously reaching up to grab the mug and sniff at the contents before chugging it down rapidly. Huh. It’s his specialised hang-over remedy that he never shares with anyone because he always claims that they’re ‘stupid enough to drink and therefore smart enough to know better and suffer the consequences’. He must really have been pleased with her performance in the exams the day before. 

Orochimaru doesn’t say anything he doesn’t mean; so he doesn’t say a lot and doesn’t suffer fools besides. But Anko wouldn’t have him any other way. 

She wonders what the future will hold with her as his apprentice in a more official capacity. She’s glad at least, that she’ll have him and his quiet support, in the small things at least. 

Time, she eyes the cluster of snakes around her, to figure out how to escape this mess. She resigns herself to being bitten and the future with a smile.

**

She comes awake all at once. A mess of sensations overwhelming her senses. Instead of panicking, however, Anko keeps her eyes closed and takes stock of the situation. 

Anko is 15 and feels like death warmed over. She’s sore, so sore all over. Her neck especially is killing her. 

Something. Something important happened, and she furrows her brow above her closed eyes. Something important. And she can’t remember, not quite. Her memory is fuzzy, and nothing especially comes to mind at first recall. Likely, nothing happened. But- Anko notes, trying to subtly flex her wrists- she can’t move. Restrained to _something_ , wherever she is, she’s surrounded by people who don’t trust her not to hurt herself ( _or someone else_ , she thinks with mild satisfaction). 

Maybe she took a hard hit to the head at her latest mission, and gave the medic nin attending an especially difficult time. Maybe she’s been captured by enemy forces, she thinks. But she was with Sensei-- Sensei wouldn’t let anything happen to her-- she was with Sensei? 

But, she thinks, Sensei has been acting weird recently. Secretive and suspicious and paranoid, but her Sensei, nonetheless. Maybe they were in the lab and something happened, a lab explosion maybe? Some infiltration perhaps? But Sensei, Anko is assured, would have protected her. So why is she restrained then? 

There’s panic in the village, this she knows, especially with the Kyuubei being released so recently, and the Fourth Hokage dying. But what the kami-loving fuck happened? And when she opens her eyes, to the too bright lights, and white starkness of the hospital room, Anko registers that she’s alone. For the first time in a long time, there is no one waiting with her to wake up. No Sumire, no Sensei, not even a nurse or a Med-nin. 

There are bars blocking the window, and seals along the perimeter of the room, and she is alone. 

Something happened, Anko realises, panicked. Something bad. And this time, it involved her. She recognizes the skyline of Konoha, fuzzily through the bars of the window, but there is no sound carrying through towards her. Sound-cancelling seals, then. Someone doesn’t want people to know that she’s in this room, then. 

Anko is hyperventilating a little now. She’s alone, she doesn’t know what happened, she’s restrained, and Sensei isn’t here. He’ll come, probably. If--if. If she can remember where he is maybe? If she can remember what happened? He’ll come back for her though, she thinks resolutely. 

He always does.

**finally, there is a knock at the door, to signal to her that someone is about to enter her room. She expects a nurse maybe, a med-nin most likely. What she does not expect is to see the recently recumbent Third Hokage glide his way into the room, with an entourage of three ninja that she recognizes from her internships at T&I (an Aburame, and two Yamanaka- her head is too fuzzy to recall names at the moment, but despite how well she knows them, has worked with them for months on and off, their expressions are shuttered and dark). Her heart stutters, and she can feel her neck tense from the strain of looking up, but she refuses to break eye contact. Or blink. Someone’s going to break the silence and tell her what’s going on, and it’s going to happen soon. 

Another thing that she doesn’t expect, however, is the Third Hokage to be the one to break the silence. Sarutobi sighs, a deep and heavy thing, and with a gentle tone that doesn’t match the atmosphere of the room, asks her “What do you know of Orochimaru’s whereabouts?”

Anko’s heart stops. “What?” She manages to croak, eyes wide, and so so confused. “He- what? What are you talking about isn’t he in the village? Is it a mission? Did a mission go wrong? What-” she bites her tongue, pausing to corral her swirling thoughts before she manages, coherently, brokenly, to ask, “what- what happened?”

Sarutobi sighs again, and begins to tell her. 

He’s lamenting and sad, but there is something sharp and distrusting in his gaze. 

When she asks, though, when the retrieval team is departing and when she’ll be cleared to join them, the Hokage sighs again, and tells her that she isn’t going to be cleared to leave the village for a while. 

It hurts. It stings and burns and she can’t breathe with the anger that threatens to rise up. She swallows it down though (just like Orochimaru-Sensei taught her to) and breathes out the rage. 

The Hokage’s word is law, after all. (It’s only later, after he’s left and she’s all alone that she realises- he never told her whether he was sending out a retrieval team to execute Sensei. He avoided the question. It explains why he couldn’t meet her gaze, then. Wouldn’t meet her gaze. _The old man is too soft for his own good,_ she seethes. _But then what does that mean about her_ \- she refuses to think about it). 

After, after the tears have dried, and the shinobi have left, leaving her with expressions marked with pity and distrust, Anko dwells. 

Anko is under watch as a wild card and someone who’s been marked as being related to the traitor. It hurts her, that someone she loved and looked up to, can betray her, can betray their village, can betray her, so thoroughly. It hurts her, that the village that she’s given her life for, protected again and again with her blood and sweat and devotion, can turn on her so suspiciously and concisely. So easily. It hurts. 

He’s obviously good for nothing. He’s obviously evil. So why does she feel so empty?

Why, a small, teeny part of her that she can’t manage to squash down quite yet whispers, why did he leave you behind? And she weeps again, fresh tears trickling down her face, that she, unable to wipe away, lets fall.

**


	2. Chapter 2

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Where Inu can't leave well enough alone and Anko makes herself a promise.

Here’s the tragedy/here’s the horror: Orochimaru left and he never bothered to even bother being half enough of a bastard for Anko to hate him properly. Oh to others? Definitely. He wasn’t well enough liked by half- too much a monster for even the monsters to stomach. Too much the ever curious pariah, the ever searching heretic who cared more for his personal successes than the overwhelming needs of the majority.

He was, apparently, someone who cared too little and too much by wholes (never halves, never measures) to handle. 

And Anko is left to pick up the mess, left to live in the disaster that he created. Left to shoulder the hate and the mess he made alone, unloved, and craving violence. 

**

Anko’s trying to tear _him_ out bit by bit. She’s also trying to understand how the person who took her in and taught her and raised her can do so many horrible things, not just to her but to others. (She realises this, can’t pretend otherwise, when she sneaks into the archives and reads more and more files about the raids on his bases: raids with more and more tunnels and more and more kids, smaller than her but just like her. Used, abused, left behind to rot and die once they didn’t live up to expectations). 

He left her, _he left_. So she’s going to unlearn almost everything that he taught her. (At least, unlearning the things that won’t lead to her immediate death, that is). 

Where he told her to be quiet so nobody expects what she can do, she’s going to become loud- loud enough the villagers can’t ignore her, can’t just forget and dismiss her. Because she’s a monster, a killer, a monster, and she might as well embrace that she will never fit in. Never be loved and accepted and hide in the shadows. So she’ll make them underestimate her in other ways. 

He’s _gone_ , never bothered to stay and see what she’d become. What horrors that she’d face and come out the other side, grinning and shaken but still alive. What she’d do with the things he taught her, the lessons she learned. 

_Too bad,_ Anko thinks vindictively. _I’ll figure out how to live again, and_ she thinks with a bloodthirsty grin, _I’ll thrive, tearing you and the empire you built down, bit by bit._

**

So Orochimaru defects and Anko is alone. Maybe not so alone: there are other shinobi alone and hurting in the aftermath of the culmination of the tragedies that befell Konoha one after another. But she _feels_ alone, in the way that a tooth feels alone after it has been beaten out of the mouth that it once resided in. Bloody and single, it is alone, like the others but jagged and broken and unable to ever be repaired properly. Only by pulling the dying root out can it be fixed and replaced or regrown, but never repaired to what it once was. 

A disgusting metaphor, Anko thinks, but apt she feels. 

She has to tear down his empire of dirt and regrow herself from the burned out ashes (or maybe fall with the rest of everything that he created, as she feels is more fitting). 

Anko has to destroy him to prove herself; she has to see the kind of monster that he’s become, to prove to herself that he’s as irredeemable as they say. 

**

As it turns out, she’s not the only shinobi that feels that she needs to understand that Orochimaru, that He, is truly irredeemable. That doesn’t trust her to have figured it out for herself, as she breaks into archives and reads between the lines of the mission reports and files and sees the bloody, so bloody, history and bodies that her mentor left behind. Not even of enemies, maybe she’d be able to ignore it if it was enemies, but _children, that he took and kidnapped and lied to and experimented on, abandoning to die once they had failed in their purposes._

(There’s things that don’t add up quite enough though, in the reports she reads: huge sections blacked out or ripped and missing, or just. No continuity or follow through investigations: like how he managed to kidnap such large quantities of children without a follow up investigation being launched by the Hokage or at least involved and secondary parties; how he got the funding when missions outside the village had been slowly but surely drying up for him- the village too scared to let one of their remaining Sannin trump cards out in case he left like the others (like that mattered in the end, seeing the damage he caused by staying anyway); how he even got access to all the redacted lines of branch after branch of kekkei genkai, foreign and familiar alike. 

There are too many questions and pictures that don’t add up, and Anko doesn’t like what her gut is telling her. But she has to lay low and think, something that she’s always been good at doing, one of the reasons why Orochimaru probably picked her anyways (but, she squashes that thought, because he probably picked her for her perceived ability to follow directions flawlessly and without question, determined for perfection and success). 

_Well not anymore,_ she thinks. It’s time to cause trouble. 

**

Unfortunately for her, she’s being followed. By _Inu_ of all shinobi. The annoying bastard can’t leave well enough alone, sticking his snout in the business of other ANBU’s, not that she’s one anymore, having been kicked out and put on watch ever since the Orochimaru incident. 

ANBU aren’t supposed to know each other’s identities, like it’s ever stopped them from being nosy where they shouldn’t and fraternizing outside their top secret identities anyway. 

So for _Hatake Kakashi_ of all shinobi to approach her, in mask no less, knowing she knows who he is, knowing he knows who she is, is ballsy as fuck. At least he approaches her at Training Ground 2, her usual go-to place despite the associated memories with it, where there isn’t a crowd and therefore, she hopes, no gossipers to watch and shit-talk her moreso than usual. 

**

“I don't think you would get it” Anko sneers, because this is the golden boy: the prodigy and the genius who has luck and disaster in equal measure handed to him. The one who, even when his life crashed around him, had a wonderful team and a sensei who loved him and a goddamn support system. Not like her, the orphan, the unlucky one, who had no one except her sensei and her summons, until even those left, choosing between the greater of the two evils. 

“Try me,” Kakashi says “we both lost people who we looked up to even if it was in...different ways.” he finishes, as if the words taste sour in his mouth. 

“THAT'S THE THING THOUGH!” she seethes, “Your sensei was WONDERFUL. He built things and saved lives and he left behind a legacy that you are doing everything in your power to protect” she looks a little knowingly at him, stressing the world legacy, and he stiffens a little bit, wondering if she knows just what she’s implying and just what the mandate entails. 

“And mi-ine, broke thi-iings” Anko hiccups, breath catching “he was ho-oorible. So I’m going to te-ear down his legacy bi-it by bit.” 

He’s eyeing her dubiously, as if she’s about to start bawling and lose all composure, which, as if! She’s shinobi enough to know when to not show tears. She’s shed enough in private. “Even if that includes me.” “Alright,” Inu says, and then body flickers away, masks back in place, face impassive and voice locked in place. 

And once again, Anko is alone. 

_Just how I like it_ , she thinks bitterly. As if she had any other choice. 


End file.
